No matter how many times we’ve seen it before, the frenzy for launching a military attack on another country is — to the extent we’re not numb — profoundly upsetting. Tanked up with talking points in ...

Carol Saller’s recent post on repetition inspires me to say just a little more about the subject. Let me take the sentence I just wrote, and you just read, as a path to talking about the basic issue ...

The “repetition compulsion” is a basic concept in psychotherapy. The compulsion to repeat is particularly interesting because what is repeated is not pleasurable. On the contrary, it is usually a ...

I think about Jackson Pollock and Adolf Wölfli a lot. Pollock: Depressive, tortured and famous for flinging thousands of tendrils of paint onto a surface, the polarizing Abstract Expressionist who ...

From articles by Anne Applebaum published in The Atlantic since 2021. Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute, which is “dedicated to strengthening ...